


The Bad Guys

by NYLizard



Category: Extraction (2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28343412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NYLizard/pseuds/NYLizard
Summary: After losing everything, Ovi turns to the ghosts of his past to guide him out of the darkness. Problem is, now he’s hungry, lost, and alone, and being one of the good guys isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If only ghosts didn’t suck so much at telling you how to survive.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

“You know that he is dead, Ovi.”

The boy leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the rug beneath his feet. It was definitely not Persian. Sure, it was nice enough to fool most people, and it would make them think that this bigshot doctor fellow was a bigger bigshot than he really was, but Ovi knew better. This was fake.

“Ovi?”

Ovi cleared his throat and rubbed his nose. “But it was so…so real this time.”

“You saw him die.”

“I saw him get shot.”

The man sighed as if they’d been through this a hundred times in the past eight months, which they very likely had been. “Ovi, you need to understand - it is not uncommon for someone who has gone through a traumatic event such as yourself to have something like this happen. Do you remember what we talked about? What you did not have?”

Ovi reached down to run his fingers across the rug. It was definitely not silk, and absolutely not Persian, no way. “Closure,” he recited. “I did not have closure.” He looked up at the man who sat behind his great fake-mahogany desk twirling a pen like he had much better things to attend to. “But I could swear that I really saw him this time.”

The doctor sighed. Was he actually a real doctor, Ovi wondered? How much school could he possibly have needed to learn how to ask stupid questions? “Were you wearing your glasses, Ovi?” And there it was, another stupid question.

The boy closed his eyes. “I was in the swimming pool. So no, I was not wearing my glasses. But I –”

“It is the same as the other times, Ovi. You were not wearing your glasses. The world was a blur. Just like the time you spent with him in Dhaka.”

Ovi recalled how he’d set his eyeglasses down on the bar at the club right before going out to the alley. Right before they’d come and shot his friend. Right before he’d been grabbed and tied up and taken. No, he hadn’t had his glasses. But his eyesight wasn’t that bad. “It really looked like him, though. I think it might have….”

The man leaned back in his pleather chair, not missing a beat with the pen-twirling. “Let us go through this again, Ovi, alright?” He stared at Ovi until the boy sat up and leaned against the couch cushions. “You remember why this man –” 

“His name was Tyler.”

“– that does not matter, he could just as easily have been another man with a different name. You remember why this man came to get you, right? Tell me why he came to Dhaka to get you.”

Ovi’s throat tightened. Another man with a different name, and Ovi would likely be the one who was dead instead of the man whose name was Tyler. Which he wasn’t. Dead, that is. Tyler Rake was not dead. 

Was he?

“Ovi. Why did that man come to get you?”

Ovi swallowed. “He, uh…he thought he would get money.”

“That is right. He was a mercenary.”

“Yes, but –”

“And what does that mean?”

He hated this question. He hated the answer. And he was starting to hate the man who kept making him say it out loud. Ovi clenched and then released his jaw. “It means…it means that he was paid to do things.”

“That is correct. This man, Ovi, yes, he took you from the men who kidnapped you. But he did not do it because he cared about you. He did it because he was promised money in exchange. A very large sum of money, no doubt.” As if he’d made a point, as if he had any idea what he was talking about, the crazy-boy doctor (Ovi at this point still wasn’t sure which of the two of them was more crazy) gave a leisurely stretch, tossed his pen onto the desk, and leaned back even farther in his chair. “You knew the man for less than twenty-four hours. It is admirable that you came to care for him, but that speaks only to you, Ovi. You were just a boy living through a terrible situation. It is only natural that you would look to the person who seemed to have intervened on your behalf as…” he paused a moment to look to the ceiling, searching for the correct word. “As a hero of sorts.”

“He rescued me.” Ovi was desperate to validate somewhere, somehow, with someone, what he knew to be true. What he thought he knew to be true. No, he was sure. He remembered. 

Didn’t he? 

“He was sent by your father to retrieve you. Not to rescue you. They are not the same. He expected to be paid. That is all. It was something he’d done many times before. You were not special to him. You meant nothing.”

“But he knew there was no money! And yet he still –”

“Oh, but Ovi, you have told me before, don’t you remember?” The doctor sat up and sifted through his notes. “Yes, here. You said that he told you he would not leave you on the streets because you were his only chance to get his money. This was not the kind of man who would risk his life for a boy he’d just met and would never see again. He did it for money, as he had many times before.”

“But he –”

“He expected to be paid.”

Ovi closed his eyes and took a slow breath. “No. No, not at the end. He was a hero. He –”

“He killed many innocent men. Men who had families. Young men who had their whole lives ahead of them. Is this something that heroes do? No. This was a very dangerous man, Ovi. He was not your friend.” 

Ovi closed his eyes tighter, but rather than shutting out the images of Tyler Rake snuffing out one life after the next, it only made them more vivid. His voice, when it came, was a shallow whisper. “Those men were trying to kill us. They were the bad guys.”

“No, Ovi. Those men were trying to kill him. From their perspective, the man they were pursuing was the bad guy. They’d been told he was a terrorist. And in a sense, he was, no? A hired terrorist. A man who killed indiscriminately because he was being paid by your father to do a job.”

The smugness. It made Ovi’s skin crawl. He looked up at the doctor. “You are being paid by my father to do a job.”

And now, smugness in a smile. “No, Ovi. I am being paid nothing. I am treating you because I owed your father. This is how I am repaying him.” And I don’t care about you any more than Tyler Rake did. He didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t have to.

Ovi hung his head again and stared at the stupid, tacky rug. “But I saw him this time. I…I think I actually did this time.” The carpet blurred. “It seemed so real this time.”

The doctor slid his box of coarse tissues across his desk. “It will get better, Ovi. In time, you will feel your connection to this man who died on the bridge weaken, and then it will slip away. But first, you must accept that he is gone. Only then will you be ready to move forward.”


	2. Chapter 2

Sayed pulled his dripping goggles off his face and stretched them to the top of his head as he emerged from the slightly deeper water and waded toward the shoreline. “Man, it is hot today!” Even if he hadn’t been wearing a wet suit, the water still wouldn’t have provided much of a cool-down. 

Professor Jahan stood up from his folding chair and waved him over. “Sayed, here. Put the containers in the cooler.”

Sayed held out the Nalgene containers of sediment to one of the two graduate students who had come along for the ride. And what a ride it had been! Holy hell. Sayed glanced up at the bridge, almost directly above them, that was still jam-packed with vehicles. At this point, most of the owners of the vehicles seemed to have abandoned driving altogether to walk, which did nothing but grind everything to a complete standstill. “The hell is going on today, anyway?” He had expected to be at the shoreline three hours earlier than they had actually pulled up. In other words, before they’d reached the downright sweltering portion of the day. As it was, the two grad students had only just now gotten the motorboat into the water.

The plan had been to arrive before sunrise, start collecting vegetation from the riverbanks, do the dives for sediment and bottom vegetation near the bank, head out to the middle for deeper sediment and vegetation samples, and be back to campus by mid-afternoon. The first slowdown had happened when his advisor decided he wanted to come along with them to grab some samples of his own for another project. Nothing like waiting politely for Doctor Jahan to finish his morning tea. Then they’d hit the roadblocks and traffic backup, and the fiery ashes of what was left of the plan had gone straight to hell.

Ahsan, the grad student who’d taken the containers from Sayed, opened the lid of the cooler and set them inside. “Raju hiked up to the bridge, talked to one of the police. He said they’re looking for a terrorist or something.”

“No shit?” This kind of stuff had never happened in the middle of Pennsylvania. What he would have given right now to breathe in some of the cool, clean mountain air that swept through Happy Valley. “What did the guy do? Blow something up or something?”

Raju, grad student number two, shrugged. “The man just said they were looking for a terrorist. They’ve got police and military on all the bridges coming out of the city.”

“Huh.” The only thing that generated this kind of traffic nightmare back in grad school was football weekends. Those Americans sure liked their college football games. After five years, two for his Masters and three for his Ph.D., Sayed still didn’t totally understand the game. But he did love the atmosphere of them. He was looking forward to returning in a few months to visit with a friend.

But for now, back at home working through this post-doc research, there was shit to do, most of which was grimy and tedious. These polluted samples weren’t going to collect, analyze, and graph themselves.

Sayed waded over to the boat. “Which of you is going to –” He cut himself off mid-sentence at the popping sound of gunfire, followed by shouts and more gunfire, then an explosion, from somewhere up above. “Holy shit!” Of all the bridges in Dhaka, he wondered, what were the odds this terrorist guy would have picked this one?

The four of them – Sayed, Professor Jahan, Raju, and Ahsan – turned toward the sound. They could see nothing from where they stood, which made the continued gunshots and yelling seem even more threatening. “Maybe we should leave,” Raju ventured.

Sayed shook his head. “We’re probably safer down here, out of range of the damn bullets.”

Professor Jahan, as calm and nonchalant as ever, nodded. “Sayed is right. We will stay here until things are resolved, but we should pack up now.” He glanced toward the bridge. “It seems this is not an ideal sampling day.”

The men worked together to collect the cooler, sampling containers, and other gear to put back in the SUV they’d borrowed from the university. 

They hadn’t even gotten around to taking the motor off the boat when the police helicopter showed up, and they all turned to watch. “Oh shit,” Ahsan said, “those guys in there are shooting! Do you see that? The police in the helicopter are shooting at someone on the bridge. This is crazy!”

The helicopter hovered directly over the bridge for a moment, then pulled back some. The men who had been sitting along its edges were gone. More gunshots were fired off.

Sayed’s gut churned at the loss of life that must be occurring on that bridge right now. His instinct to survive nearly forgotten, everything in him yearned to get up there immediately and start saving people. He almost felt like he was physically fighting it, the urge to run toward whomever was being injured in this battle. It was times like this that made him question his shift from pre-medicine, where he would have followed in his father’s footsteps, to environmental pollution studies. He remembered his father’s words at the news – whether you save people, or save people from themselves, you are doing noble work – but Sayed wasn’t interested in noble. He was only interested in right, and that meant so many different things. At this particular moment in time, it meant to hell with un-fucking a polluted river. His first responder training was chomping at the bit to make itself useful.

There was a whoosh from somewhere behind them, and then the helicopter was cut in two in a fiery explosion. The four men watched from the riverbank, horrified, as the chopper, fully engulfed in flames, spun out of control, hit the bridge, teetered for a moment on the edge of it, and finally tipped backwards and plunged into the water below.

It took only an instant for Sayed to spring into action. He set the scuba mask over his face and grabbed his fins and tank. “I’m heading out to see if anyone survived. Raju, bring the boat and meet me out in the middle.” 

Without argument or question, both younger men headed for the boat to pull it back into the water as Sayed reapplied his gear. He waded out until it was deep enough to swim, then set his mouthpiece in, turned his headlamp on, and went under.

#

It took way too long to get out to the middle. Sayed knew it, knew that even if anyone had survived the helicopter crash, they would likely have drowned by now, but he couldn’t stop himself. He had to see. He had to know for sure. What if there was an air pocket up inside the chopper? What if there was a man down there right now, burned and terrified, gasping his last breaths from a tiny bubble of trapped air?

The two students had gotten the boat ready and caught up with him, so Sayed took hold of the edge and let them tow him to the spot under the bridge between the two pilings where the helicopter had gone down. More gunshots were being fired up above, but Sayed concentrated on the sound of the water lapping against the side of the boat and on the hope that if there were someone still alive down below, he’d get to them in time.

“Here.” He tapped the side of the boat, and Ahsan pulled it around in a small circle and killed the motor as Sayed lowered himself into the murky water. 

Sediment swirled around him as he neared the sunken chopper. Sayed’s gut churned as he approached the burned-up shell of it through the hazy light of his headlamp. 

It was awful. It took only a moment for Sayed to confirm that nobody, in fact, had survived the inferno. Two bodies, recognizable as human in shape only, bobbed within their black metal coffin. Now that the last little spark of hope he’d brought down into the water with him was extinguished, defeat washed over Sayed.

This had been part of what had turned him away from medicine, he remembered: the crushing emotional toll of sometimes not being enough. Not fast enough, not smart enough, not good enough. Nobody had the power to give back a life that had been taken before they’d arrived, but it didn’t matter. Sayed always felt the defeat.

He turned from the wreckage and swam toward the light above. He could have removed the bodies, brought them to the surface, but he’d leave that to the police divers. 

A shadow from above startled Sayed, slowing him, and for an instant, he thought it was the boat, that he was surfacing right under the boat. But the boat wasn’t a boat, and it was coming down to meet him as he rose up the last few meters.

It was a man. A man, thrown down to Sayed from the heavens like a second chance.

Sayed wrapped an arm around the man’s chest and attempted to tug him toward the surface. The guy, loaded to the gills with all kinds of equipment, was incredibly heavy. As the water soaked through his clothing and gear, he became an anchor, pulling them both down. Quickly, Sayed worked to remove the man’s vest, his utility belt, his…gun?...and anything else he could pull off of him, letting the items sink into the depths so he could lug the body to the surface. Because with the trail of blood that swirled around them, Sayed wondered if this were in fact just another body. 

But the hope was still there, and Sayed never gave up until all hope was gone.

Raju and Ahsan had seen him almost surface and met him under the bridge. “Is he alive?” Raju asked as they tried to pull the man into the boat.

Sayed pulled his mouthpiece out. “Not sure. He’s badly hurt. Go, go, let’s just get him out of the water over there.” There was no time to have Sayed struggle himself and the man into the boat. Ahsan started the motor, and they turned toward the shore.

As they approached the bank, a second helicopter took off from just around the other side of the bridge, on their side of the river. The quiet that followed would have been eerie, Sayed thought for an instant, if it hadn’t been for the sound of his own commands. “Pull him out, put pressure on that neck wound!” 

On the way to shore, from his spot dangling over the edge of the boat with the unconscious man, Sayed had been able to figure out that most of the blood was coming from a hole in the guy’s neck. So, with one arm hooked over the side of the boat and the other looped under the guy’s arm so he was backed firmly up against Sayed, that neck wound was where he’d clasped his hand and held tight. The man was, miraculously, still alive, which led Sayed to believe that whatever had cut through his throat (a bullet, he assumed, based on the events of the previous twenty minutes) had missed the actual artery. 

At Sayed’s direction, the four of them carried the wounded man to the SUV; Sayed slid into the back of it with him, removing his hand from the wound only long enough to put several layers of gauze onto it from his first aid kit. “Head east, and make a left on the highway to go north,” he instructed. “There’s a hospital ten minutes up. Ahsan, grab my phone. It’s in the…yeah, there. You got it. I need to call my father.” 

By the time they pulled up to the front door of the small teaching hospital, Sayed had gotten hold of his father – a retired surgeon who was now a part-time instructor there – and made sure that somebody would be waiting for them when they arrived. A team of nurses and interns slid the wounded man out of the vehicle and onto a gurney, and with Sayed’s hand still wrapped around the guy’s neck, they rushed through the entrance. Without missing a beat as they raced the gurney through the hallways, a young woman cut at the man’s pants while another used shears to remove his shirt. By the time they’d gotten up the elevator and were heading to the operating room where Sayed’s father waited, scrubbed and ready for surgery, the man from the river had been stripped naked, given an IV, and examined for any and all additional visible injuries. And it was only after he’d made eye contact with his father through the doors of the operating room that Sayed took his hand off the man’s neck wound and sent up a prayer to Allah: Please don’t take this one.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Little bit of profanity.

Ovi leaned against the wall he was sitting next to and stared at Prisha’s thigh that was pressed up against his. She wasn’t the girl he’d hoped would be interested in him so many months earlier, but she was sweet and friendly and didn’t seem to mind that he was broken.

He didn’t have many friends left since the kidnapping. The ones who weren’t outright afraid to be within two meters of Ovi had parents who’d given strict instructions that their boys were not to be involved with him in any way, ever again. The funeral for his friend who had died in the alley, shot by Ovi’s kidnappers, had been attended by the majority of the student body. And even though they didn’t know the details, and they weren’t clear on who the players were, there was one glaring truth: being friends with Ovi was dangerous.

He’d gotten used to it by now. After Nik had rescued him, she’d told him he should go back to life as normal when he got home. As if he himself was still normal, or even the same person, anymore. As if it hadn’t even happened. As if he didn’t jolt awake in a cold sweat every single night to the ringing sound of gunfire and the musky sweet smell of sweat and blood, all courtesy of his own mind and memories.

It took him a minute or two every night to stop hearing the guns and the explosions. To stop seeing the blood and the bodies. To realize once again that he was safe in his own dark bedroom, listening not to the grunts and screams of the dying, but to the light chirps and twitters of the nighttime birds and insects outside his window.

Prisha leaned in close. Her breath brushed against his cheek. She slid her hand over to his and entwined her fingers with his. “Come to my house after school,” she whispered.

He nodded in response.

Her parents would not approve. But her parents were always away.

#

They lay on her bed, side-by-side, staring at the ceiling, holding hands. Ovi wasn’t even sure she was the kind of girl he would have given a second glance to, eight months earlier. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty, either. She didn’t laugh much. She hardly talked to anyone. She didn’t belong to any school clubs or go to parties or talk to the other kids in the hallways between classes.

But she didn’t ask questions, either. And she didn’t tell Ovi how he should feel or how things were.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she asked.

After a moment, Ovi rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. He reached over and used his fingers to brush lightly through her hair. And in that moment, as not-pretty as Prisha was, Ovi was struck by her loveliness. The way the sunlight from the window made her hair and her eyes and her lips shine with the beauty of acceptance.

He licked his lips, and then leaned forward and paired them gently with hers.

Twenty minutes later, he rolled himself off the side of her bed. “I should get home now.” They’d only been kissing, but the longer it went on, the more desperate he was for…something. Something more.

But he knew that wasn’t what she wanted. Or at least, he assumed that wasn’t what she wanted. It was disrespectful. Sinful, even.

As if anything in his small and sheltered world could ever be considered sinful, after the hell that had played out before his eyes. The hell that he had _participated_ in.

He had killed a man, for fuck’s sake.

But this was just a little schoolboy romance with a girl who didn’t ask questions when he wandered off to someplace else in his head while he was sitting right next to her. She’d had her own stuff to deal with in her life, and it wasn’t stuff he asked her about. There was a mutual acceptance and denial of all things past when they were together, and Ovi was just happy to be in the presence of somebody who didn’t care that he wasn’t always there, even when he was.

As he walked home, Ovi took a moment to pretend that Tyler Rake was walking next to him. It was something he often did during those moments in his life when guidance would have been nice. Some kind of fatherly, brotherly, manly, whatever, guidance in whether he was doing it right. _Any_ of it: school, friends, girls, life.

_Was it okay that I kissed her?_ he imagined himself asking his pretend mentor. And he imagined that Tyler would narrow his eyes and do that little smile thing that was almost a laugh, the way he’d done when Ovi had asked him if his last name was a gardening tool. And then Tyler would say….

What would he say? What advice would a man like Tyler give to a boy whose father wasn’t much of a father?

He couldn’t think of what words Tyler would have said. No, it was easier to try to imagine first how he would have been. Tyler had had a wife, he’d said so. Who was he with her? Who had he been as a husband?

Despite the roughness of their time together, the small glimpses of care dispersed through those hours gave Ovi a clear image of who Tyler would be as a man, without the guns and the ammo and the killing: gentle. He would be gentle. He would set his palm against her cheek, brush his fingers through her hair, run his thumb over her lips, and then lean over her and kiss her. There would be respect and care in his movements and in his strength.

Ovi was positive that that was who Tyler Rake would have been, with a woman. So that was the silent advice that Ovi had taken. That was who Ovi had tried to be with Prisha.

He wished he had somebody to tell him if he’d done it right.

As the sky darkened and the first stars peeked through the light from the cold darkness of eternity, Ovi rifled through his mind for the care-moments that he kept guarded in his memories. The times when he was positive that Tyler Rake had cared for him and not just thought of him as a giant sack of money to be dragged around.

One of the few things he’d never told anyone about, not even the stupid doctor, and certainly not Prisha, was the pants.

As ridiculously trivial as it was, it also seemed too private. Too personal. Too…embarrassing.

The kidnappers had grabbed him from the alleyway, tied him up, and taken him in a van, then on a plane. He’d been gagged and bound the whole time. Nobody had asked if he was comfortable. Nobody had asked if he needed anything.

Food? Water?

Toilet?

He’d waited as long as he could. Maybe, he had thought, even as they shoved him around and yelled at him and slapped him in the head, maybe somebody would give him a second to pee somewhere other than in his pants.

But by the time they’d gotten Ovi to the room and tied him to the chair, trembling and crying and begging for his life, there was plenty of ammunition for them to mock him, given the soaking wet stain on the front of his navy-blue trousers. They laughed at him. They called him weak, which he already felt that he was in many ways, thanks to his father’s input. They used words and actions to intimidate and humiliate him. And all of it, every little stinking part of it, had worked. He’d wet himself three more times in those many hours – twice out of desperation again, and the final time in response to the gun they’d held against his groin while they told him how they would blow his manhood to bits and he would live the rest of his life pissing like a little girl.

He had prayed for help, prayed for strength, prayed for bravery. But the man cocked the gun and pressed it against him, and the rest of them howled with cruel laughter when Ovi’s body failed him once again and fluid dripped from between his shaking legs to the floor.

And then, not thirty minutes later, Tyler had come.

Ovi still had the image of Tyler Rake in his head, standing there looking over his shoulder when the bag had been pulled off Ovi’s head. He had assumed the man with the muscles and tattoos was either another prisoner, or somebody there to mock and torture him some more. Ovi hadn’t expected him to be the help and strength and bravery he had prayed for.

The bag had been set back in place, and Ovi had once again been left alone. Then, not long afterward, came the sound of gunfire, and crashing around, and yelling, and Ovi had waited for somebody to come into the room and put a gun to his head and pull the trigger.

But when the bag came off, there was the man, untying him and leading him to safety.

And when he’d finally opened the trunk of the car to let Ovi out, one of the first things he’d handed him was…pants. Fresh pants.

Tyler had had no way of knowing whether Ovi was weak or strong or whatever. _Here, put these on._ And that was it. Just exactly the same way he handed him the water and the food: pants. Another obvious necessity. There was no need for explanation or excuses. No mocking. No humiliation.

And Ovi was almost as grateful for that as he was for the rescue.

If only he could thank Tyler for that tiny bit of compassion that had meant such a ridiculous amount to him.

But of course, there _was_ , he realized. There was absolutely a way for him to send a thank-you up into the universe with Tyler’s name tied to it. He just needed to accept. He just needed to get out of his own head and know that what he had seen was what he had seen.

_All_ of it. Not just the parts he _wanted_ to believe. Because if it were true that Tyler had been a hero, that Tyler had cared about what happened to Ovi, then all of it had to be true.

Even the ending.

#

There were too many cars in the driveway. Way too many cars.

Ovi slowed as he approached the house. He’d become wary over the months. Jumpy. Anything out of the ordinary put him on guard.

“Ovi!” shouted one of the men who’d spotted him from the doorway of the house. “Ovi, come inside. Quickly.”

Ovi quickened his pace, but only slightly. The man who was waving him toward the house was one of the newer ones. Over the past eight months, it seemed like there were constantly different men switching places, guarding the house and meeting with each other and counting money. His house had always been a place of safety for them, but before, it had felt to Ovi like it was still his home as well. Now, it was just the place where he lived. It had been better, before.

Before the kidnapping. Before Dhaka. Before Tyler.

Back when Saju had been in charge.

Saju had been not so much like an older brother, but definitely like an uncle or an older cousin. With Saju, it was all business with the men, but friendly greetings and smiles for Ovi. Sure, he had been a pain sometimes, scolding Ovi if he got home late or pushing him to finish his homework; but it never felt like it was done out of duty. Scolding was usually followed by light-hearted teasing about something, and homework demands were often met with homework assistance. Saju had even sometimes stayed to eat dinner with Ovi, and a couple of times he’d brought his wife and little boy to join them. He had been kind and intelligent.

Though Ovi hadn’t really thought about it before Dhaka, the truth of it was glaringly, heartbreakingly obvious to him now: Saju had cared about him. He had felt more like family than anyone else in Ovi’s world at that time.

As soon as Ovi reached the front door, the guard – Saumit? – grabbed him by the arm and yanked him inside. “I told you to hurry, boy.”

Ovi jerked his arm away, but the man was already letting go and one of the other men was approaching. Ovi wracked his brain trying to remember this one’s name. The man took him by the shoulders as if they were close friends and looked him in the eye. “Your father,” he said, giving Ovi’s arms a light squeeze. “Your father is dead.”


	4. Chapter 4

Colonel Rashid clasped his hands behind his back as he paced through the room a second time, stepping carefully to avoid the bodies, the blood, and the improvised weapons.

This was where the battle had begun. He was sure of it. Four days of backtracking from the bridge, the burned buildings, dozens of bodies, and dozens more witnesses (for as much good as they were; one would think with that many eyes watching the same events unfold, more than two stories would flow together without conflict). Four days of picking through rubble. Walking from the center of the neighborhood – the epicenter of the battle – to the Sultana Kamal Bridge, and back again, over and over.

And then the reports from other parts of town that needed to be sorted through to determine which were your normal, average, run-of-the-mill murders and deaths, and which were connected in some way to the disaster, that absolutely horrific comedy of errors, that had taken place on the bridge.

“Sir?”

Rashid turned to his officer. “Yes?”

The man handed over a thin, broken length of plastic. “We found this at the bottom of the stairway.”

The man clearly thought his superior was insane, wasting so much time picking at the details of this whole other massacre, but that was how most of Nayem Rashid’s life had been – others questioning his fixation on the intricate details.

That fixation is what had put him in the position he was now in, though. He was the one giving orders, and the order had been to bring him anything out of the ordinary.

Rashid took the piece of plastic – a broken zip tie. “This was the only one?” he asked.

The officer nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The Colonel nodded back. “Very good. Thank you. Keep looking.”

After the man had left, Rashid walked to the counter where he’d set the file folder. He opened the folder and sifted through the papers until he’d reached the printout of the photo. He picked it up and stared at the man in it, then held up the zip-tie. “This was for you, wasn’t it?” Rashid asked the picture.

The photo of Tyler Rake, the Australian special-operations-soldier-turned-terrorist, didn’t answer. Not from the photo, anyway.

Rashid looked around him once again to the stinking bodies, covered with flies and maggots, whose stench was what had gotten the police called to this remote set of buildings just that morning. Among the confusion and unanswered questions and obvious coverups and false leads, one truth had been made obvious to Rashid with the discovery of this room, and it cut through everything else like a beam of light: this was not the loud and world-stopping work of a terrorist.

This was the work of someone trying to get away quickly and quietly. But if that were the case, why had Tyler Rake been here to start with? And why hadn’t he just left? What – or perhaps who? – had effectively crippled such an obviously capable operative, when he clearly wanted to leave? It should have been nothing for a man like Tyler Rake to have slipped away quietly, undetected; yet, here they were, four days later, with dozens of dead bodies, a complex wake of destruction to sort through, and no clear motive. Rashid looked at the photo again. “What were you doing in my city, my friend?”

He knew where the actual answer lay, but Colonel Yasmin was dead. Bullet to the brain. Excellent sniper shot, he’d been told. He clenched his jaw.

Some people got what they deserved. Then, it was usually up to other people to sort out the mess they’d left behind. And the newly promoted Colonel Rashid was an excellent sorter of messes.

He set the photo down and stepped over to the small room off to the side of the kitchen. Maybe this was where his answer was hidden.

#

Sayed gingerly crossed the floor until he stood at the foot of the bed. The man lay still, hooked up to multiple pieces of machinery that were essentially the rope which held him firmly in this world. Things had been dicey at first, with the man nearly dying twice in those first twenty-four hours, but as determined as this man seemed to be to leave his life behind, Sayed’s father was equally stubborn and won the battle for this particular soul. It wasn’t going anywhere.

They’d figured out by now that somebody was probably looking for this man. He didn’t belong here, it was obvious. He wasn’t just _not brown_. He was also muscled, tattooed, scarred, and beaten. And he was alive, for goodness sake. A normal average everyday man, somebody like Sayed, for instance, would have either surrendered or been killed several wounds earlier than this man had given up.

Sayed wasn’t even sure that he’d given up, so much as he’d finally been stopped. He was like the fucking Terminator.

But stopped from what? What had he been doing? It didn’t make sense. Not very much actual information had been shared by the police, but what Sayed did know was that nothing had been blown up other than police and military vehicles. No churches, no markets, no government buildings. Whoever this guy was, if he was the one the police were looking for, he sure as hell wasn’t your typical terrorist.

Dr. Azad, Sayed’s father, had ordered the man to be put in isolation in a part of the hospital that was only accessible to a small number of people. He wasn’t a stupid man, and he certainly wasn’t unpatriotic, but he was a doctor first, and this was his patient who he had worked diligently to save. Dr. Azad had no intention of allowing anyone to take this masterpiece of medical artistry and put a bullet in its brain. Fortunately, the other doctors and students in the hospital had a great deal of respect and admiration for Dr. Azad. If the police did come looking for their terrorist here, none of them would admit to having treated a bullet-riddled white man on the day of the bridge massacre. They would leave that to the doctor to deal with as he saw fit.

Tentatively, as if he were afraid of waking the man up, Sayed made his way around to the side of the bed. He set his fingers against the man’s arm, which was warmer and softer than Sayed expected. As if seeing him look half-dead like this, he’d expected him to feel halfway cold and rigid. The man’s chest rose and fell in time with the quiet hiss and sigh of the ventilator. Sayed wrapped his hand around the arm and gave a light squeeze. “Who are you, my friend? And what were you doing in my city?”

#

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, working once again to separate the memories into two concise piles: those that were real, and those that weren’t.

It wasn’t easy.

He was getting better at it, though. The less often he occupied that chaotic void between asleep and awake, the more tightly he could grasp the threads of reality that flitted through the storm in his mind. Little by little, those gathered threads wound together to create a solid string of memory. When that happened, he held on tight. Enough strings to braid together, and soon he’d have a rope to pull himself free of the delirium that kept dragging him under.

Early on, it had been a battle – sometimes mental, sometimes physical. He’d thought he was back in Afghanistan more than once, captured by the Taliban. They hovered over him, asking questions in a language he couldn’t understand. They crammed an entire snake down his throat, then pulled it back out again at some point.

He had lashed out. Fought them. Given one a bloody nose. Had that been real?

Then, in the middle of the struggle, he’d remembered that he had returned to Australia after Afghanistan. Then how could….?

And then the darkness had come back, washed over him in a drug-induced wave.

He had no idea at this point how often they had happened, those brief moments of consciousness, or how much time had passed. But each time he woke up again, he was better able to retrieve the little bits of truth that had filtered through each of the times before. Better able to dismiss what was definitely not real.

The Taliban cave he’d awoken in? Not real.

The hospital bed he lay in? Real.

His boy? Real.

His boy, gone? Painfully, horribly real.

His boy, reborn as a brown-skinned teenager? Eh…he’d give that one a half-real.

The nurse who morphed readily from human form to cobra and back again?

Tyler Rake took in a slow breath through his nose and blew it back out again. Hard to say, with that one. His mother had been a nurse. As far as he could tell, they were capable of just about anything.

“You are awake.”

Tyler ignored the pain in his neck and turned toward the heavily accented voice. It belonged to an older man who wore brown pants and a white coat.

The doctor – more likely Bangladeshi than Afghani, if Tyler had sorted his reality piles correctly – tipped his head toward the doorway he’d just come through. “One of the orderlies noticed you were awake and called me. He, uh…” The man touched his own nose. “He did not want to put himself in harm’s way again.”

Tyler closed his eyes for an instant. Bloody nose: real. He would have muttered an apology, if his voice had worked.

The doctor gave a gentle smile. “You are a very strong man, sir. Most would not have survived your injuries.”

Tyler had had no intention or expectation of survival at the end, if he remembered correctly, but that wasn’t this guy’s problem. This man was obviously a healer among healers. Where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would have failed, this man had succeeded. Tyler would just have to wait a little longer to see his boy.

Doctor Savior came to stand by the bedside of Humpty Dumpty, maybe to take a closer look at his repair work. “Do you know where you are?” he asked, reaching to adjust his patient’s tubing. “Do you remember what happened? Don’t try to speak, just a nod for now, small movements. Your neck is still healing. The tracheotomy tube will not allow you to speak.”

Do you know _where you are?_ Or _what happened?_ Inevitably, the next question would be _who you are?_ These were not questions Tyler was ready to answer, so he remained still. Not because he didn’t know. Because he didn’t trust.

Rather than repeat the questions, the man gave a slight nod. Perhaps an indication that he respected his patient’s unwillingness to communicate at this particular time.

“You were shot through the neck,” he told Tyler. “Among other things, of course, but that and a punctured lung – another gunshot wound – were your most damaging injuries.”

Tyler had already mentally reconstructed the immediate pre-hospital timeline of his memories, and what a sturdy rope they made. He climbed that memory rope now, starting from the last thing he remembered and working backward to the beginning of the end:

  * plunging into the river, just after
  * leaning against the railing of the bridge, where he was
  * holding his neck, startled at the sudden gush of blood that had left
  * Nik watching him, horrified, as they’d been
  * moving toward the helicopter, right after
  * taking out the soldiers trying to stop them, seconds after Tyler had been
  * sitting against the truck and telling the kid to run to the helicopter.



_The kid._ The boy….

Had Ovi made it? Had Nik gotten him home?

Tyler recalled the look on her face, just before he’d dropped himself over the edge. Last thing they’d needed was to try and come back for him when he was already dead anyway, and he knew the only way Nik would leave would be if he left first.

She was probably still kicking herself for taking her eye off the sight of her rifle. Amateur mistake if there ever was one, she would have said. She was probably still blaming herself for him getting shot and almost killed.

_Almost_ killed _._

But…did she even know that he hadn’t been?

#

It took three more days for Colonel Rashid to find the terrorist. To not only realize, from the discarded items found by his divers at the bottom of the river, that the man’s body had been separated from some key pieces of equipment, but that he was, indeed, still alive.

Dr. Azad was a stubborn man. He skirted Rashid’s questions like the true solider he had once been. But by now, Rashid suspected he knew the purpose of the Australian’s visit to Dhaka. He’d found evidence of the boy. He already knew all about Amir Ashad and was well aware of his prior boss’s allegiance to the mob man’s money. It wasn’t just his prior boss, either. There was a web full of higher-up connections to the man, and Rashid had to tread delicately to avoid bumping the wrong threads. It was a dirty exchange of power for cash, of loyalty for the silence of sins, and it ran through the ranks of the police like piss down a stairwell.

It wasn’t until Rashid’s third visit to the hospital, alone and off-duty this time, that the doctor finally walked him through the hallways, down the elevator, along more hallways, and beyond two locked doors to where Rashid’s terrorist lay not quite dying.

He stood staring at the man who he’d only seen in a couple of photos up until now. Even lying in a hospital bed, sedated and unconscious, hooked up to tubes and wires and implements, the man looked like a he could swat the life out of any one of them as easily as a baker kills a fly.

“He took quite a few of my men,” Rashid said.

The doctor nodded. “He is a soldier, for certain.”

Rashid sighed. “You understand what he did, do you not?”

The doctor nodded again. “I do.”

“And you understand that others will be coming to ask questions. To check your records and speak with your staff. It is a bad situation all around. People could get… _hurt_.”

Again, Dr. Azad nodded.

“Then you’ll understand when I say – this man cannot be left to live.” He glanced at the doctor. “I am counting on you, sir. You make sure this man is dead before tomorrow.”


End file.
